Okay ...... I said I would wait for a few more years but I caved in. I bought a smartphone. A HTC Desire for a whopping 400 euros. Sounds bad? It's still only half what an iPhone 4 costs and still 30% cheaper than an iPhone 3G which has way fewer features.
So, because I know there's quite a lot of geeks here, and the Android is THE geek phone, I thought you guys (and girls) might be able to help me with apps, emulators, etc. to fill up my phone or maybe even good sites to visit (besides the obvious ones).

While I applaud your choice of HTC (I have a HTC Touch HD myself), I'm not switching to Android anytime soon (mine runs Windows Mobile). I still consider Adroid too immature, and there are too many pieces of software I use regularly that aren't ported to it yet. Especially my ebook reader of choice.

I want an HTC Touch Pro 2 so bad. its not offered by carriers in my area of Canada.

Well the way the phones are designed, they can easily be updated so I see no big problem there. The memory, screen and CPU are the main limitations and for the Desire, you got a nice big resolution, a multi touch screen and a powerful CPU and enough memory so it would surprise me if future updates wouldn't work fine - Android is already a year and a half old now as well, though, so it's not THAT new and already performs better than iOS.

f you want to start playing around with custom ROMs and so on I can strongly recommend checking out the xda developers forums and also villainROM. The main ROM at villain is for the HTC Hero (which is what I have) but they also have a desire section.
ConnectBot is very useful to ssh to servers or to get a local terminal.
If you are a BSkyB customer be sure to check out the Sky+ app (that's a plug to my employers btw... but it is useful)
Titanium Backup is probably the best backup application for Android - you should get root on your phone though with a superuser app... there are instructions on xda dev or villain.
That barely scratches the surface....
Edit: for ebooks look at Aldiko and Vudroid for PDFs... robo defense and flight director are both simple but addictive games.

If you're in Europe get the Nokia n900 unlocked with Maemo on it, it does everything I wish Android did.
However, if you're stuck in a crappy country with locked down phones, Android is a relatively open phone. Despite Wishbone's opinion that it's immature I can't think of any major app I've been unable to find, and for free. I find that it's pretty stable too and its battery life is no worse than any other data heavy smartphone.

I've got the HTC Desire and I can't say I'm disappointed. The only thing missing is pay-for app store, I wish google would get off their asses and release it over here too. Free apps are cool, but the really good ones cost money.

I can't recommend many apps since I mostly use what came with the phone standard. What I did find on mine (HTC Hero, US model), though, is that 'task killers' caused all sorts of weird behavior. Got rid of it and the phone now runs much better with no more annoying reboots, fewer apps launching themselves, no more screw-ups with media players, and maybe even better battery life. Now I kill apps using Menu - Settings - Applications - Running Services. Made it a main page icon for one-touch access.
One app I did get is Vanilla Music Player, a really stripped down, well, music player. Plays in shuffle mode which is all I really want, and takes very little memory.

Nesoid <3

It's standard Debian. Anything you can do on Debian you can do on that phone. You can get root easily, run ssh tunnels to all your devices, the possibilities really are pretty endless. Just google some stuff people do on it. There are guys that administer server farms remotely from that thing. Plus instead of needing a mobile version of an app that already exists you just grab it from the Debian repos.

Umm, I thought Android is Linux too, and therefore can do all that too, no?

It's very modified. Even the Java VM is a partial, ground up implementation called Dalvik. Also, getting an app to run on it straight from a Debian repo is non-trivial and probably impossible in a lot of cases. In addition, the Motorola Droid phones in most areas are extremely locked down and cannot load custom ROMs (they can be rooted, but that's the easy part). Even the HTC phones (I own one of these) is incredibly locked down and difficult to modify

Ok, thanks for the info.